Google Results an Absolute Joke

I'm REALLY starting to notice a huge reduction in quality of Google's search results. It's not been great for all of 2012, but it's been ok'ish, but all of a sudden it's like some sub-standard search engine from the 90's.

Here's an example I searched for just to test things out:

great css guide

Obvious what anyone searching for this wants. What's number 1 in Google?

Pretty much useless. I didn't ask for 40+ tutorials, layouts and random junk.

Number 3:

http://www.w3schools.com/css/

www.w3schools.com/css/

Ok, but not great. I didn't ask for a bog standard tutorial.

Number 4:

http://sixrevisions.com/css/20_websites_learn_master_css/

Again I don't want 20 websites. I just want a great guide, is it asking too much?

Let's look at Bing

Number 1:

http://htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/

htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginnerThe purpose of this guide is to teach the bare essentials - just enough to get started. ...CSS, or Cascading Styles Sheets, is a way to style HTML. Whereas the HTML is the ..

Better.. Looks like a good site. To the point and from a high quality site.

meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2012/10/01/csstdg4e
01/10/2012 · What amuses me about all this is the way the writing of CSS: The DefinitiveGuide has come ... version of their third-edition counterparts, though of course a great ...

Not bad, it's interesting and relevant which you don't get in Google anymore. All you ever find in Google is super bog standard boring 'authority' sites, videos, forum posts, reviews, commercial crap and sales pages.

You never find those good interesting high quality blogs/help sites. Bing here has given me 3 great interesting sites that aren't trying to sell me something.

Number 4 is the w3schools one

Number 5 is http://kay.smoljak.com/2006/09/great-idea-css-style-guides/

kay.smoljak.com/2006/09/great-idea-css-style-guides
I&#8217;m a bit behind on my blog read*ing, so it&#8217;s only today that I saw this great link on Site*point. Cre*at*ing a Style-Guide for your site talks about a sim ...

Again it's a REAL blog written by someone who enjoys the topic. It has some ads, but who cares. Ads are fine as long as the content is good.

I'm going to be switching permanently to bing. What a difference. Bing is like Google was when they first started.

I also recommend you guys check out blekko.com

http://blekko.com/ws/great+css+guide

Interesting results. A lot of really good domains coming up. It's pretty much all high quality reading material.

The truth is.. It's really not difficult to build a search engine that produces good results for users. bing and blekko have proven that. There's so many techniques for measuring quality and relevance. The truth I'm sad to say is Google are just not interested in providing a great user experience. They're only interested in increasing profits. I don't know what's going on at Google, but large public companies are shareholder driven and they have to show growth and consistent profits otherwise they get interrogated by the major shareholders.. We're likely to see Facebook start to really go downhill too since it went public.

Feel free to share interesting Google SERP results vs other search engines here. It'll be interesting to see some of the junk coming up.

EDIT: GAAAH. Colors got all messed up. Some stuff was black text. I'll just make it all red, sorry.

Maybe there are some drawbacks in googles search results...........
But we cant compare any other search engine with the mighty google..........
Its undoubtedly the No-1 search engine whatsoever...................................

I've noticed it too. It looks like google is putting more emphasis on, "authority" domains and that domain can dominate the first 1 or 2 pages of the results. For example, some keywords only list youtube videos for the first two pages before ever referring to another domain name. Pretty ridiculous.

I had people over yesterday for a party, and we got on a discussion about Google because I pay the bills and provide for my family with IM money. A retired school teacher noted how she had to go to page 4 of Google to get away from the domain crowding and find a relevant result. I educated everyone that was over how they could report their displeasure with the search results to Google, showed them where the paid ads were (all over and above the fold) so they don't click them in the future and said they could find better results on Bing.

The bottom line is that non-techies/webmasters are noticing Google's thin shit SERPS.

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